“Piper Jaffray maintained an ‘outperform’ rating and $100 target price on Apple Computer, saying the company’s iTunes music-download service could begin to have a ‘notable’ earnings impact in calendar 2005 and 2006,” Forbes reports.

“‘We are currently modeling for iTunes revenue to account for 3.6% of revenue in calendar 2006,’ the research firm said. Piper Jaffray said iTunes downloads for calendar 2005 could reach 513 million versus the current estimate of 387 million, and 2006 iTunes downloads could reach 1.0 billion versus the current estimate of 542 million,” Forbes reports. “Piper Jaffray believes price-to-earnings multiples for Apple shares haven’t factored in the “massive success” of the iPod nor the iPod’s ‘halo effect’ that is expected to carry over to Apple’s core Mac business.”

Speaking of sucking, I don’t see any similar stories about Napster-To-Blow anywhere, do you? No, I keed, I keed. Of course I’ve seen stories about Napster’s service sucking. Yessssss. Sucking big time. The kind of sucking sound only a shitzu could make. Or Paris Hilton. By the way . . . Paris, you BITCH!. If my blackberry brings one more time I’m going to send you a personally iCard from Chris Gorog!!! I’ll bet even you wouldn’t suck on that, you Napster-using tramp. Noooo. No, I keed.

This is a story utterly lacking any real imagination or insight, and woefully undersells the accelerating success story that is iTMS.

At the last reporting point (24/01/05), Apple effectively reported that sales were now running at 1.428 million tracks/day – having served some 50 million tracks between 10/01 and 24/01. At that rate, Apple is extremely likely to report that 300 million track milestone has been reached at some point in the next 14 days (perhaps even tomorrow) which would mean that Apple had already moved over 110 million tracks in 67 days.

So, if iPod sales were to drop off a cliff, Apple could move 550 million tracks in calendar 2005 assuming no growth in the iTMS market.

However, cumulative iPod numbers pretty much double every six months – meaning that Apple could find itself with another 10 million iPods in use by the end of June and around 40 million iPods (including Shuffles) in circulation by the end of 2005. Even cutting those numbers in half to 20 million iPods in the wild would very likely result in 50 million tracks being served every 15 days or so.

The real likelihood is that iTMS is likely to pass the 1 billion downloads milestone sometime between the end of August and mid-October this year, especially when you remember that iTMS Japan/Australia/NZ are still to launch. If only there was an iTMS Brasil or iTMS Latin America.

its nice when you have technology that you USE. Apple did this with iTMS. There is so much crap out there that tries to make your life more simple, but really doesn’t, but iTMS is one of the things that DOES. It brings the world of music to your fingertips, and I’d be scared of it if I had a music store in the real world.